Fuhrer of Film
by MuddyWolf
Summary: An interdimensional bureaucrat relocates the displaced soul of Bradley. Disregards the Gate theory. It's fun. Read it. XD


Legal Stuff: The gate theory is convoluted and mind-numbing and awesome---but I'm going to lay it on the table because it doesn't suit my diabolical purposes---ah, right, Pride is not mine. He belongs to Hiromu Arakawa. Uh, did someone take this title already? If the originator of this title steps up, I'll gladly change it. oO Don't want to infringe on anyone's intellectual property. OO Language, Pride angst. Have fun.

6/1/06

Führer of Film

By Blue9Tiger

In a minute, he was dead.

The ashes settled---no, they were burned up—gone.

Bye-bye, daddy,

_You selfish bastard_

_They're holding a funeral for me tomorrow and you won't even be there!_

_Burn in hell!_

_Oh, I forgot. _

_The White God of the Eastern Plain_

_You already did._

_Dispatched thee with a just flame_

_Then why am I still talking to you?_

_Melt..melt into non-existence…._

_But hell's too good for you._

_Come back—_

_Melt—_

_I wanna tell you how much I hate you!_

Some rubbish screamed and laughed in his head. He—still had a head? No, it wasn't there. A trick, or an illusion. He passed his hand through his head. No, no head. No hand either.

No body.

But there was a desk. That was plain enough. A desk with an inkwell and a piece of parchment. It was an old desk---definitely fashioned before the time when humanity lost its faith and began to rely more and more on alchemy.

For Amestris would like to see itself as a uniformly scientific civilization---when all it was was that they had short memories. Humans had short memories.

He examined his surroundings with his nonexistent hands clasped behind his back and an admantine gaze. The screaming voices were in his head, his imagined or insubstantial head---they were loud and incessant, a relentless throb in that space up there where he imagined his head would be.

But—it just wasn't there—the noise, the screams, some desperate, but all accusing---a tardy judge that had determined the Fuhrer's role in this disgusting crime and was now passing sentence---

Hm? What judge? Just the own distant voices in his intangible—well, no longer his head, but his entire being filled with the nonsense, no less articulate, but---

Why did it hurt?

It suddenly occurred to him that he had a soul.

He laughed hollowly. It reverberated in the empty void.

_The damned do have a soul. Can it be possible?_

The realization only angered him. He crushed the nothingness in his fists.

He didn't lack it at all. It just had been crushed, mangled---subjugated. By endless, endless lies….

Only then he realized he had been deceieved. Like all the rest. Like that idealist fool Lust and that simpleton Gluttony, that intolerable Wrath and gullible Sloth.

_Why, father?_

With his nonexistent eyes he saw the broken form of the child shriek, all bloodied, his eyes filled with terror. The desk and inkwell by now had vanished. In its place were humans, crying, screaming, calling for justice, mute tongues cut out, nameless corpses, some not human, some beastly, growling in agony and in hate, some picked apart by maggots…

He hated this..this_ soul_ of his…

It was so much easier to see the naked, ugly truth. He had caused untold misery and pain—and for what?

He didn't know anymore.

Drained, he let himself collapse in front of the desk. To his surprise he felt himself much shorter than the desk. It then occurred to him that he was sitting on the floor. He looked down under him, and he was indeed sitting on some kind floor that wasn't there. As out of habit—though as of late his master permitted him to bow to him, the Homunculus sat with his legs under him as his hands rooted to the floor, head slightly bowed, in a habitual signal of submission.

"I'm delighted you've finally wised up to the grievous situation that you're in."

"What are you?" Pride growled imperiously from his lowly seat on the floor. That he had to stretch his thick neck upwards to keep his unsettling eyes on the figure that had materialized in the leather seat above him was nothing short of humiliation. But—after all that he had done, perhaps he deserved it. So he bore it with cold resentment.

"My, how original---but, don't mistake me for you," The figure in the seat lightly dipped the feather in the inkwell and leered at the Homunculus maliciously."I am---" The mysterious figure stood up grandly in his cushy chair and bowed with his fingers delicately touching his heart—"the director of the bureau of resettling souls in-transit."

The said soul stared dumbly while his left eye roved where it wanted to go.

"Now—_what _is that monstrosity?" the man scratched his stubbly chin with a forefinger and crossed his legs. He was luxuriously dressed in a blinding white suit and trousers and a silk tie. The sitting creature was stark naked. He should get this over quickly, so as to rid himself of that awful sight. He held up a palm towards the Homunculus who had started to answer but was cut off. "You _are _awareof the nearly unredeemable magnitude of the monstrous crimes you've committed in the name of---" The finely attired man drew out a stack of files, licked his finger, thumbed through them, and drew one of them out, squinted at the picture, looked back and forth several times from the face below his desk and the face on the file, and put a hand to his mouth in shock. "Oh—oh—I am _dreadfully _sorry---I had the wrong monster---" He tossed the file into a bin with the others and retrieved another file that bore a color photograph of a joyful and joyless face with a moustache. He stared down over his desk and matched the photograph with the purely joyless face sitting on the floor. Satisfied, he began to read the type.

"Your name is Pride, alias King Bradley—yes?"

The hard-looking being shook his head in a terse affirmative. Even now the bodies swam before his eyes, drowning in an ocean of red. "Date of death: 01- 06 – nineteen hundred and fifteen." He muttered the rest of the type and looked up suddenly. "As I understand it, you had no will of your own. An almost mindless machine. Or a machine with a mind but no soul." He grinned and leaned forward, his sleeves brushing the polished desk. "Which one is it?"

"I am a Homunculus."

"And what exactly is a Homunculus?" Pride opened his mouth to answer, but he was abruptly cut off. "I will answer that---because I know that you will only tell me what you have heard from others---you don't know what you are, do you?" The said Homunculus grew more irritated by the moment. The Ultimate Eye flashed death at this presumptuous imbecile. He instinctively reached for his sword but it was not at his side. Outside his expressions remained hard, arrogant. Inside he was---something---he couldn't name the emotion. _Afraid? Perish the thought---dispatch it at once._

How long would he be tormented like this?

"I will tell you what a Homunculus is! A former human robbed of its will, identity, self-worth, manipulated by its nutritional needs to serve a purpose that they are tricked into believing is worthwhile---a false salvation! And here you are, you've loyally served your master and what do you have to show for it?"

Selim cried again, softly, yet so loud—so unforgiving---who could know that the cruelest hurt would be from a tear—a poisonous evil tear.. There was a moistening in the old green eye that had always been dry and frigid as the tundra north of Drachma.

"Nothing, right?—nothing except pain and loss, on the part of you, your son, your people---maybe the last will never know you were responsible for all their suffering but _you _know. And that's enough, isn't it, Fuhrer?" he sneered, now casually sprawled on the table. The crumpled figure didn't answer, staring at the floor, and Selim's glowing and bleeding face. Perhaps all those other humans, the Ishbalans, his soldiers, the chimeras---they were necessary sacrifices---all those lives blurred into one bloody stain on his now-awakened conscience, but those were all meaningless next to that one act he had done without orders—that act that had held up that hellish mirror in which he could see little more than a monster trying to hide his true self under meager trappings of respectability.

What had this madness all been for?

What could he have been if not for this---charade? A loving father, a true leader and not a puppet forever yearning to sever its strings?

"----But because the bureau has taken special consideration of your case in light of the circumstances---"

His stare was blank. He looked a hundred years older. The man in the suit's voice bounced on without him actually hearing it. Pride thought he heard his son again—he thought he felt him—that wasn't possible, because none of this was real. He was dead.

_Why do I feel more alive now than when I was alive?_

_We're not alive. _

Lust's silk voice served as a piercing reminder.

And it was only now that he realized how right she was.

_We are incomplete, imperfect, and dead._

The man in the suit leaned his chin on his clasped fingers, his mouth completely serious but his eyes aflame with mischief.

"So let me tell you what I'm going to do. On world 10,756,892, the German moving picture industry is in need of some a real kick---sprawling worker-slave cities, state-of-the-art robot dragons, and a lady-killer that will break as many hearts as he will break the wills of his actors, if I see that uncultivated devil in your soul, and do I see it! Yes—being the magnanimous Director of the Bureau of Resettlement of Souls In-Transit that I am, I'm going to let you be who you would have been if your master never got a hold of you. In other words, get out of my sight."

With a wave of his hand, the naked soul was gone from the floor, and desk, inkwell, photograph melted away, and shattered into pieces.

In 1890 a robust baby was born in Austria to a Jewish woman and a Catholic man. The baby didn't know that his future monocle would inspire terror and admiration from the world on a collision course with the indomitable director that would break spirits and bruise knees in the glorious name of Art, but would at the same time weave unbelievable masterpieces, the ensanguined fruits of that unrivalled genius.

His second chance would not be wasted.

End


End file.
